Super Mario Bros. Wonder Preview – An Exclusive Look At Three New Courses

“Countdown to Drop Dow” served as the grand send-off for my extended hands-on session. This course transported me back to World 2 Fluff Puff Peaks. The Dropdown Countdown Lifts, which are the main gimmick of the stage, made it the hardest. The special platforms have a numerical display, which decreases each time the player lands on them. When the number reaches 0, it will dump whatever is or whoever is on top.

You can jump a lot on the Dropdown Countdown Lifts. But you have to choose your moves carefully. If you make too many mistakes, you’ll end up like Mario in the pit. Thankfully, if you leave the Lift for a short period of time, the number replenishes. This is not a guarantee when playing with a friend, because the additional characters make this stage more challenging.

The number does not only decrease when the player character lands on the Dropdown Countdown lifts. Nintendo designers know that, so they have introduced a Spiny-throwing Lakitu in the second half. It pays to use a power up that will clear Spinies from the ride, or ideally take them out even before they get on the platform. It was best to kill the Lakitu as soon as you reached a platform higher than the previous one and to use his cloud as long as I could to keep the Lakitu from reaching the next level.

Melon Piranha Plants are also featured on the stage, which is a variation of Mario’s iconic enemy. The melon themed monsters do not snap Mario’s fingers or fireballs. They spit out black seeds. The seeds won’t hurt you but can force you to go in directions that you don’t want. To reach higher heights, I bounced off seeds like airborne opponents.

The Wonder Effect was not as exciting or challenging as I expected. Mario is transported to another area, where he has to free-fall in order to locate the Wonder Seed. Stars fall on you as you free-fall, giving you an invincibility shield against Smogrins. It has a timer but it never gave me any reason to think I would run out of the time.

Countdown to Drop Down, though the most difficult level I ever played was not something that I would call overly hard. The difficulty of 2D Mario is usually ramped up gradually, but this particular level was only in the 2nd world. The later stages should test my abilities as someone who has played 2D Mario since he got his first NES controller early in the ’90s.